Blues in the Night

Chapter II Alice Ain’t

Koski knelt by the dead man. The wrinkled, winter-apple face, with its red-button nose, was still warm. The .38 was still in the watchman’s holster.

A couple of yards away, on a tier of three cases stenciled I. MacLone, Purveyors to His Majesty, Aberdeen, Scotland, a beaver coat was draped over a shiny russet handbag. A pair of girls’ gloves, pigskin, lay on the floor beside the whisky cases.

Koski stalked to the pier door, called: “Sarge. Call in. A 37. Rush it.”

On the foredeck, Mulcahey paused long enough to ask, “What gives?”

“Ed Weltz. Remember Ed? Ran that tow-tug, hauling gravel, out of Clason Point.”

“Used to play the wheeze-box at those clam roasts. Many’s the time I — what’s he doin’ here?”

“Night watchman, he was. Now he’s taking a nap — with a crate hook in his skull. Get that shortwave going.” Koski looked down at the white, upturned face of the girl huddled in the blanket. “Just felt low in your mind, did you, kid? Can’t say I blame you.”

She made no answer, but he could see her shiver and hunch her shoulders against the night chill.

He went back in the shadowless half gloom of the huge shed. As he strode past squat bales of green cowhides crusty with coarse salt, great coffin-like boxes labeled Forrester Brothers. Fine Weavers. Kirkannis, Perth, giant stackings of the MacLone cases, the reek of whisky became stronger.

Always, in unloading cargo nets full of liquor, longshoremen managed to drop and smash a case enough for it to come under the “breakage in handling” clause in a shipping manifest. That might have happened here, with a ship in from Scotland with a few thousand cases of highland dew. On the other hand, a cargo like this was one of the favorite targets of the pier pirates who’d been getting away with everything but murder. And now...? He wondered.

Fifty yards from the truck gates which opened onto the cobbled street, Koski could see the thick, iron latch-bar wasn’t in its sockets at either side of the wide swinging doors. It wouldn’t make much difference whether the watchman’s cubby-hole office was guarded or not, as long as the street gates could be entered with a mere push.

Warm yellow light streamed out from the open office door — until Koski got within a dozen yards of it. Then it slammed shut.

He ran to it, twisting the knob, throwing his weight against the panel. It was locked.

Inside, a muffled voice cried, “One of ’em’s tryin’ to get in here, now!”

Koski went back two steps, came, booting hard. There was a flat, brittle cracking — a splintering of wood high up on the jamb. The guy inside was shooting at him through the door!

Koski’s hand went to the butt of his own pistol, then he decided against it. He picked up a wooden wedge used for blocking trailer tires, ran to the truck gate, pulled one side open, slipped out into the street.

Cafe signs made a mock rainbow in the mist. The street was empty. No trucks or cars. The watchman’s peephole window was dark. The man might have doused the office light before ducking out to the street himself. Koski crouched beneath the level of the peephole, hurled the wedge block.

Glass crashed. A gun answered. Koski didn’t see the muzzle flare. He crashed shoulder-first into the watchman’s street door. It banged back against the wall — and the Harbor Precinct’s trouble-shooter was in his own rough-and-tumble element.

The man fired again. The bullet hit the metal sign stating that the premises were protected by a nationally famous detective agency, whined into the ceiling.

Koski got fingers on the gun barrel. He could see it better than anything else in the murk. He got in a short, savage left, caught a knee in the groin, wrested the weapon away, clubbed it once, twice. The man in the dark fell against Ed Weltz’s single-legged stool.

Koski put the hand flash on him. He was a thin, wiry specimen with a high, narrow head and a bony face, twenty-eight or thirty, maybe. Balding forehead — which added to the bony impression. Thin, pinched-in lips. He couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and forty with rubber boots on. What he wore were thick longshore brogans, a pair of blue jeans and a turtle-neck sweater.

He was limp as an empty burlap bag when Koski clicked on the lone bulb and stretched him out on the floor. His pockets told only that he smoked a pipe, used No Zleep pills, had about ten dollars in his imitation alligator billfold, owed money to a loan company and carried a Social Security card made out to Harold F. Remsen.

He tried to sit up as Koski was stuffing the wallet back in his jeans. The lieutenant put a foot on his chest.

“I can hear you okay when you’re flat on your back. What you doin’ in Weltz’s office?”

“Calling the cops.” Remsen glared. “What the hell you doin’ here?”

Koski took off his visored cap with the Marine Division insignia, held it where the other could see it. “I was answering your call. We don’t generally have this much trouble with people who holler for help, though.”

“I thought you were one them liquor thieves.” Remsen scowled at the cap, rubbed his mouth where the gun sight had lacerated it. “They killed Cap Weltz.”

“Did you see ’em do it?” Koski took his foot away.

“No. I was over at Gallattly’s, havin’ a san’wich an’ a cup of coffee. I’m head checker on this pier. I been puttin’ in overtime checkin’ out that Glascow cargo that come in this mornin’. The ship’s makin’ a quickie turnaround an’ starts loadin’ again in the mornin’. Well, when I got back from feedin’ my face, Cap wasn’t here, but the office door was open — so I smell a rat right off.”

“But you didn’t see any rats?” Koski hauled him to his feet.

“Wasn’t a soul in the shed, officer.” Remsen was sweating. “Thing I noticed first off, a couple hundred cases of whisky weren’t in the stacks where I’d checked ’em off. If there’d only been a few missing, I might not’ve noticed. But that many—”

“Yeah.” Koski locked the office door, unlocked the one to the pier. “So?” He pushed Remsen through into the dim-lit shed.

“I ran down to the end, yellin’ like crazy for Cap, knowin’ somethin’ must’ve happened to him, an’ I practically trip over him. He’s lyin’ back there with a grab-hook stuck in his head.”

Ordinarily, Steve Koski would have felt a little silly, striding along beside a skinny character like that while carrying a gun in each fist. But something about the sidelong glances Remsen sneaked at him while they trudged through the semi-darkness made the lieutenant wonder why the checker had been so quick on the trigger when he hadn’t even hollered to find out who was on the other side of that door.

“Do you know a girl, name of Alice Rorty, Remsen?”

“Rorty? Never heard of her.”

“Cap have any girl friend?”

“Nah. All he’s interested in, he’s got an a-cordeen, plays it sometimes nights when I’m workin’. It don’t sound had in a place big as this. I mean, it didn’t.”

“How long were you gone for eats?”

“Oh, you know. Half an hour. Maybe three-quarters. I signed out with Cap. I guess it’s on his hook when I left. Around ten o’clock, somewhere around that.”

Koski looked at his wrist watch. If the cold bath hadn’t slowed it, it was now five minutes past eleven. Still, even an hour was a short time to put the snatch on three hundred cases of Scotch worth close to fifteen thousand bucks.

When they came to the watchman’s body, Koski asked, “Did you move him, or touch him?”

“Cripes, no! I could see he was dead. I know better’n that. You ain’t suppose to move a murdered person.”

“That’s right. But somebody did. Maybe the killer. He fell on his face when that hook caught him. See that smudge on his nose and chin?”

“Yuh.” Remsen said nothing about the much more obvious smear of crimson lipstick by the dead man’s mouth.

“Then somebody rolled him over on his side.” Koski hooked an arm inside Remsen’s, led him to the little door opening onto the river.

Remsen seemed scared at the sight of the police-boat with its square green flag fluttering damply in the mist. But when he saw the girl in the cockpit, he cried out:

“Ellen!”

She seemed to shrivel up inside the cocoon of blanket. She turned her face away, began to cry noiselessly.

Koski said, “Thought you didn’t know her?”

The checker said fiercely, “Her name ain’t Rorty! And you’re damn right I know her! She’s my sister!”

Koski cocked his head at the sound of sirens in the street he’d just left. “You noticed the lipstick on Weltz’s face, didn’t you?”

Remsen ignored him, fell to his knees on the stringpiece, leaning over to get his face as close to his sister’s as possible. “Ellen! Ellen!”

She stared up dumbly, her eyes glassy with tears.

He clapped his hands to his head, swayed back and forth like a man in great pain. “Why’d you do it, Sis? Why’d you do it?”

She spoke then, thickly but distinctly, as a drunken person does when trying to enunciate clearly.

“You know why I did — what I had to, Hal.”